Notes on the Fourth dimension

I

Mark Fisher writes that “Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.” In the Fourth Dimension, a call centre in Mumbai, workers are identified by their numbers, their blood type and surveilled and rewarded depending on their ability to morph into coercive or helpful depending on the script they have been given. Taught to mimic John and Jane Does -  who are simultaneously dead bodies that cannot be identified and also the average American man or woman - their job is to control and extract the emotional registers of the organ which pumps blood and nutrients around their bodies in order to cultivate the flourishing of the organism that is the business of the call centre.

In the Fourth Dimension, authentic life is not as important as its replication so John and Jane is a film with no truth and no lies. Its form rhymes with hybrid documentary but it is not either fiction or fact. John and Jane is a piece of speculative fact/ fiction.

The word speculative shares its lineage to the latin root specere meaning “to look at” which itself owes its origins to Proto-Indo-European root “spek” meaning “to observe''. Relations include the Sanskrit spasati “sees”, Avestan spasyeiti “spies”, Greek skopein “behold, look, consider”, skeptesthai “to look at”, and spehhon meaning “to spy”.

Implicated in this etymological detour is the cultural artefact of film, the filmmaker himself, the creator of the  spectacle and the director of the spectator.  The American dream as culture and imperialism - as contained in its fashions, music and films - in all its forms, broken and whole, is the liminal space in the Fourth Dimension. It permeates the sounds, the gestures and atmospheres contained within. Cultural references change and shift throughout the film, but their power to get inside bodies, through ingestion, recitation, and physical transformation is constant.

II

In the Fourth Dimension there are no passports or visas but there is an entry system to a ‘true self.’ Ostensibly, this hinges on the giving and receiving of a name, but materially it is through management of bodily feeling. In her book “the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling'' Arlie Rothschild asks what happens when a “private emotional system has been subordinated by a commercial logic?” In John and Jane we see different bodies perform this commercialised human feeling to sell insurance, magazine subscriptions, courses and to troubleshoot (or fail to troubleshoot) the problems of customers. Contorting their feelings, they mobilise a performance of sincerity at the service not of connection, but extractive etiquette.

In the film birth names are shed and new ones given easily: the myth of personal transformation and freedom of movement begins through the fantasies embedded into their porous westernised names like Nicky, Naomi, and Glen. Naming in the Fourth Dimension - as in the bootstraps rhetoric of the conservative Hindu diaspora who will one day form a tech elite - is a technology for and against assimilation, for and against nationalism. Naming and renaming in the Fourth dimension is presented as freedom to possess an individualised identity, where anyone can be anything. Outside the enclosure of the Fourth dimension though the shadow of their original names loom large - keep them tied to class, caste and hierarchical social relating.

Names, like borders, have histories that are solid. Which name (or passport or visa) we started with might fix in place where each fantasy of speculation can begin and how far it is likely to go. Glen, a handsome, seemingly comfortable young man eye-rolls his way through his calls and complains about the lack of benefits all the while dreaming of a modelling job with Versace - the fulfilment of his ‘true’ self. Osmond, whose trust in ‘the man’ is less predicated on choice and more on desperation, must take on the fantasy offered to him by the Fourth Dimension completely. Unable to stick two fingers up and take on his own terms he must transmute into a ‘principled [company] man” in all of his being: for him there is no self left, false or true.

III

Speculation is an act of imagination, but it is also rooted in the material. In economics (the capitalist realism that rhymes with materialism) speculation, or speculative trading, refers to the act of conducting a financial transaction that has substantial risk of losing value but also holds the expectation of a significant gain or other major value. In both senses of the idea, one must imagine something different to that which exists. In both senses of the idea, one act of imagination is not like the other.

Mark Dery in his essay on Afrofuturism asks “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” In John and Jane, another question on futurity and time emerges. Can a community whose past has been mined and exploited, sold back to them for profit and a promise of a different future, participate in this transaction and fully inhabit the present?

IV

The Fourth Dimension acts as a container for neoliberal spirituality. In contrast to the celebrity guru, or the business teachers found in the tapes that workers play and are played, in the Fourth dimension, this spirituality is given a feminine, maternal sheen, aligning materialism through asceticism and reverential work ethic with familial pride, duty and lineage. In John and Jane, women utilise a highly individualised approach to embodying values to teach the art of speculation. Their tongues show how to reach for sounds in the back of mouths in order to connect to others ‘authentically’ (“its eaaaaaaa”) and their guidance leads groups through the value chain of their new identities (“Do you remember when we did, individual, family, community, nation? Underlying these themes was scarcity versus abundance”).

It is women who navigate the emotional detritus of acts of speculation rooted in transaction rather than open-endedness. Unlike the narcissistic, male workers who take on the role of professionalism in order to accumulate and provide, Nikki and Naomi become affective altruists, mining the depths of their most innermost vulnerabilities in order to protect the idea that American imperialism might be compatible with the group and its welfare. Spiritually empty and alone, they are sold back echoes of their home culture repackaged through commerce to make them feel as if they belong in their new one. The fourth dimension offers them “new-age” solutions with a white face, options for “wellness” and “beauty” extracted by explorers who mine their cultures to “self actualize” and unlock their hidden potential. These softer areas of the Fourth Dimension seem to mimic a ‘third space’- the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home ("first place") and the workplace ("second place") but in reality function to disappear all traces of it.  If India symbolises a place for a tired tech bro to retreat from work to find himself, the vision he sells back to the exploited native worker is that it is by staying at work always that they will locate their true selves.

V

The concept of the Fourth Dimension refers to parallel or alternate universes or other imagined planes of existence. In John and Jane the evocation of this concept is a sleight of hand which swaps out difference for sameness. Here again the erasure of another Third Space, the one which Homi Bhabha conceptualised “which gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.” There is no “in-between '' space where hybridity can be formed, reformed, and become something else. Here there is no simultaneity, only the binaries of difference and sameness. The Fourth Dimension is a site of geometric sorcery that reorders the shape and relative arrangement of bodily autonomy. It repackages subjugation as freedom, assimilation as individual choice. The Fourth Dimension suggests a transcendental space where boundaries have been dissolved yet to gain full access to these new expanses, the inhabitants must locate themselves as adherents to the limitations of orthodoxy: in order to gain maximum value from the American dream they must internalise its imaginary. The Fourth Dimension is is at best ambivalent about hybridity; about the interrelation of human concerns. Its true currency is unilateral mimicry and replication.

The Fourth Dimension (American Imperialism) rips out the post in postcolonialism and pivots away from the question  of the continuity of our arrival there. In the emotional vacuum of the Fourth dimension, the question remains even if it is never asked:  what is the shape and form of the histories to all of the wanting and desiring that led us here, and where is the memory of the histories that will lead us away?